Experts Database

Irene Ponzo is the Deputy Director of FIERI. She has a background in political sociology and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Sociological Research from the University of Turin (Italy). Her main research interests concern integration policies and asylum governance, with a prevailing focus on the local level and the multilevel dynamics. She has also extensively worked on migrant and refugee inclusion, paying a specific attention to the effects of economic recessions. She has participated in several EU-funded projects, both research-focused and policy-oriented, and published books and articles with international publishers.

Hannah Pool is a postdoctoral researcher working on the role of money and borders in undocumented migration trajectories at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Christina Pope is Senior Director of Welcoming International, an initiative of Welcoming America that supports and connects civil society and government institutions advancing inclusion around the world. She addresses emerging needs in the field and provides technical assistance to organizations making local policy, program, and system change to advance migrant inclusion.

Previously, Christina was Senior Network Director at Welcoming America, where she designed programs and strategy for the organization’s US network of local governments and nonprofits. Christina’s background is in community development and international education, including prior roles at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the community-based organization CASA, and the public school system of Recife, Brazil as a Fulbright grantee. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature and American studies from Oberlin College.

More about Welcoming International
Welcoming International is an initiative of Welcoming America consisting of several programs, among them the Welcoming International alliance. The alliance connects and supports peer practitioners for knowledge exchange and collaboration on network strategies, welcoming standards and accreditation programs, and emerging topics in the delivery of services and programs to national networks of inclusion practitioners.

In addition to the alliance, Welcoming America also administers international learning exchanges for local leaders, provides technical assistance to national and local institutions to advance multisector welcoming strategies, and collaborates with global partners to help welcoming localities shape international policy frameworks and narratives for better welcoming infrastructure.

I am specialised in migration, and have worked on a large range of migration, integration and refugee issues. Multilingual, with an international education and extensive work experience with an international organisation, my experience covers international cooperation and diplomacy, strategy development, and migration governance, policy and research. I have also worked at grassroots level with migrants and refugees. I have excellent academic credentials and have authored or contributed to a number of publications in the field of migration. I am driven by a passion for migration and those who move and for the big questions that arise from migration: are humans by nature sedentary or nomadic? Should migration be about the freedom of the individual or about the benefit to society? What do migration and diversity mean for the future of the nation-state, borders, and identities?

PhD Sociological Studies student @ The University of Sheffield. My research interests are: Asylum, Non-religiosity, Migration and Human Rights.

Steffen Pötzschke is a research associate at the GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim (Germany) and deputy team lead of the GESIS Panel (department Survey Design and Methodology). Steffen is also a corresponding member of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück. His research interests include international migration and mobility, transnationalism, integration, methods of migration research, and survey design.

Arnau Poy is currently a PhD Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Barcelona. From the ethnographic tradition of anthropology, his PhD research focuses on the governance of the asylum seekers' reception conditions in Spain. From a multisituated perspective, it explores the experiences of those asylum seekers who are excluded from the Spanish state reception system.